Recent years have seen a proliferation of DSCs (Digital Still Cameras) and digital single-lens reflex cameras for photographing images of photographic subjects as well as mobile camera phones and digital movie cameras. Furthermore, larger capacity recording mediums are becoming available for storing image data. These technological advances permit end users to keep a massive amount of AV (Audio Video) contents, such as static images and video images. However, it is time- and labor-consuming for a user to find a desired image from such a massive amount of still images and video images.
In order to ensure an effective retrieval of an image that the user desires, attention is being given to a technique to aid in organizing a user's collection of images by automatically classifying and tagging objects appearing in the images.
In one known approach (see Patent Literature 1), for example, a plurality of image recognition engines and model dictionaries are prepared in advance for each of a plurality of themes to allow easy and prompt acquisition of information related to respective images. When a user specifies a theme, a model dictionary and recognition engine prepared for the specified theme are used to tag objects appearing in target images and to extract information related the objects. In this way, information related to a specific object of user's interest is effectively extracted.